Geek as a platform

Blog engines comparation

I don't like Ruby, at all... Maybe because I never really "used it" so didn't have the opportunity to know its guts, or maybe because it just sucks... If you ask me, it is probably the latter :P

As you might know, Octopress (which is a great blog engine, kudos to Brandon Mathis) is written in Ruby, so every now and then I have to deal with rvm, and all the ruby paraphernaliam when an upgrade breaks it in my VM.

Working in an environment you are not familiar with is not easy and every time it breaks, I have to spend some time trouble-shooting it, so I have decided to take a look at other available blog engines, compare them with Octopress, and migrate to a more "friendly" environment (hopefully)

$ time for i in `seq 1 500`;do tinker --post "post $RANDOM";doneNew post created as '/root/bynario/2014/10/15/post_15124.rst'New post created as '/root/bynario/2014/10/15/post_19047.rst'[...]New post created as '/root/bynario/2014/10/15/post_14905.rst'New post created as '/root/bynario/2014/10/15/post_10370.rst'New post created as '/root/bynario/2014/10/15/post_4049.rst'real 2m18.046suser 1m55.815ssys 0m18.737s

Let's put the results in a table... I think figures speak for themselves:

Octopress

Tinkerer

Hugo

Page generation

7m35.910s

2m18.046s

15.123s

Site generation

2m45.143s

59.87s

2.136s

(The result may vary running the test in bare metal instead of in a -crappy- VM, but still they are very descriptives)

Based on the results:

Ok, so Octopress is slow, and old... So what? It works really good out of the box, speed would be a problem if you post several times per day, but in my case, so it is not really an issue. For me the only thing that makes me think about changing the blog engine is Ruby... As simple as that

Tinkerer looks like a neat product, and I will problably take another look at it, but since it doesn't allow markdown, I am not so sure if I feel like migrating the post to a different format... Still, it is based in Python, and it's faster than Octopress, so I will give it a try...

Then should we move to Hugo blindfolded?? I don't think so... Not just yet. It is true that it is way faster, but I found it pretty complex for someone that doesn't really want to build the blog "almost" from scratch. Nevertheless, it looks really promising, it is surprisingly fast, and run in multiple OS (even from Windows)... So it might be a perfect alternative (at least for me) as soon as it is a little bit more mature.